A crypto tycoon is giving record-breaking amounts to Farage’s party. But little is known about his motives
S
hortly before Christmas 2022, Chakrit Sakunkrit, owner of the Kamalaya Wellness Sanctuary on the Thai island of Koh Samui, invited 200 guests to spend a few days celebrating his 60th birthday. One sultry afternoon, Sakunkrit and a small group gathered around a table near the shore, surrounded by the burgundy foliage of Good Luck plants. To his right, dressed down in a polo shirt, sat Nigel Farage.
Since Brexit marked the achievement of his life’s work three years earlier, Farage had fizzled. Even some of his supporters had pronounced him finished. Now, with the Conservatives in disarray after Liz Truss’s disastrous budget that September, Farage was hinting at a still more ambitious project: to make himself prime minister.
In the talks he hosts for paying guests at Kamalaya, Sakunkrit’s topics are micronutrients or Tibetan bells. Once, he recounted a brush with mortality in his late 40s. “I was eating and drinking chocolate milk, cookies, to give me energy during the day to work 18 hours per day, day after day after day,” he said. Now, in his measured, soothing voice, he muses about living to 120.
